Charles Nutter pushed a new project up to github this week – a maven server that works as a rubygem source. You can use it to install any jar file retrievable from a maven repository as a gem for JRuby.

Its really easy in Rails to write a collections.each do{} that will cause a query for each object in the collection. This is avoidable if you know its going to happen. Bullet, a gem by Richard Huang, watches your app and logs when it determines you should use an :include param to your find methods. It also detects irrelevant :include params, and can recommend where you should use a counter cache to avoid a query.

Nathan Hurst wrote “The Visual Guide to NoSQL Systems”, a blog entry classifying all the nosql stores available. In it, he draws a triangle representing the three principles of the CAP theorem, and puts all the nosql options along each edge.

There is a little bit of theory here, but he explains it all clearly, and it can hep ilustrate the strenghs and weaknesses of all the nosql datastores out there.

Josh Crews wrote us about this blog entry he wrote, outlining the steps he took to construct a CMS system with uploadable file attachment on Heroku. He uses Typus – an admin interface generator for Rails, the rails-ckeditor plugin, and paperclip to upload to Amazon S3.

Even have to access a current_user from your controllers in your models? If you rely on monkeypatching ActiveRecord, you probably have a concurrency defect waiting to bite you in production. The SentientUser gem makes this dead simple, and adds convenience methods for setting a user in your tests or from the console. And in your models, you can simply say "User.current" to get the current user.

Apple Push Notifications are a great way to send data to iPhone applications, and this gem lets your Rails apps do it easily. It generates models for the devices you talk to and the notifications you send, and has a cronnable rake task that actually sends out the push notifications. there is a little configuration you have to step through, given Apple's developer signing keys, but it is all straightforward and documented well.

Rit. is a standalone web application that allows users to edit and schedule content. Content is served up to a consuming application as a web service. Is it a Content Management System? Not quite - and maybe better. Check out the readme on github for a really clear description of the design goals.

Previous Episodes

Happening, MacRuby and XCode, Spree, and On Cloud are covered on this episode of Ruby5. Also, we talk a bit about Good Touch, custom Shoulda macros, and remind you of the end of the call for proposals for RailsConf 2010.